SAN adoption much higher at 1TB+ shops

Posted on January 01, 2003

According to an end-user survey by market research firm PriMetrica, companies with relatively large capacities (more than 1TB of data) are—not surprisingly— more likely to have deployed storage area networks (SANs). PriMetrica interviewed 335 end users and asked them about their use of SANs, their plans for installing SANs, which operating systems they're running, and which vendors were their primary SAN suppliers.

Overall, 29% of the surveyed companies have installed a SAN. Of those sites with more than 1TB of data, 45% have a SAN, but only 10% of sites with less than 1TB have implemented a SAN.

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Of those sites where a SAN is installed, only 15% plan on adding to their SAN infrastructure, whereas almost 85% of the sites without a SAN are considering installing one, according to the survey. (The survey did not differentiate between Fibre Channel SANs and IP-based SANs.)

Users were also asked which operating systems they were running in their storage network environments. Many sites were running a mix of Windows and Unix: 293 respondents cited some variety of Unix (Solaris, Linux, AIX, etc.) while 285 cited Windows, followed by OS/390 (55), OS/400 (44), Netware (36), and "others" (36).

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In addition, the 335 users were asked which vendor was their primary SAN supplier. EMC led with a 23% share, followed closely by the combined Hewlett-Packard and Compaq at 22%, IBM (11%), Brocade (10%), and Hitachi Data Systems (7%). About 27% of the users cited "other" vendors. (The "other" vendors mentioned most frequently included Dell, Inrange, McData, Siemens, and StorageTek.)

For more details about the survey, visit www.storagewatch.com.

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